The Fastest, Fullest TED Conference Ever Starts Today

The annual Technology, Entertainment and Design conference kicks off today in Long Beach, California, where organizers hope to further broaden the appeal of what has become a global juggernaut of intellectual provocation.

We’ll be there all week, posting live dispatches from an event designed to be faster-paced than any TED yet.

While the number of TED speakers has grown to 70, the largest in the event’s history, the length of many talks has been squeezed, to 12 minutes or 9 minutes from the previous 18. Organizers say nearly half of the speakers were culled from TED’s first ever global talent search. This expansion of the franchise is reflected in this year’s official theme, “The Young. The Wise. The Undiscovered.”

The diversification of TED comes as the ideas festival is becoming an object of mainstream fascination. In the year since its last iteration, TED has been profiled in the New Yorker, parodied by The Onion, and a taken down in the New Republic. It remains to be seen whether this year’s changes will shield TED against critiques that the conference is reductive, turning complex ideas into simplistic memes and thorny social issues into technology problems.

But organizers clearly feel they’ve assembled an event that goes well beyond the types of talks given in years past, saying the global talent search garnered applications from speakers who never would have ended up on the TED stage otherwise.

And so it is that TED 2013 will include, alongside celebrities like Bono and Peter Gabriel, Richard Turere of Kenya, who built technology to protect his family’s cattle from lions, and Dong Woo Jang, a young Korean designer who carves longbows from bamboo.